Free Republic

Robots may be coming for some jobs, but they will likely create new roles as well. Here are some spots humans are needed to fill and how to get them. It has become common to joke about how robots are going to take our jobs, and rightfully so: Oxford University researchers estimate that 47% of all current US employment is at high risk to become automated over the next decade or so. But there is positive news: Of the 1.8 million jobs AI will get rid of, the emerging field will create 2.3 million by 2020, according to a recent...

3D printing technology has been used multiple times to help create drug delivery and release systems, from programmable release capsules and cancer drug-emitting implants to micro-rockets that deliver drugs inside the body and even a biomaterial sleeve that can reduce the risk of infection after a body piercing. Some researchers are working to develop 3D printed pills and vaccines that will combine multiple medications into one, and an Israeli drug delivery company will soon seek FDA approval for its 3D printed medical marijuana inhaler, which can control the doses a person inhales. But I would bet you $20 that none...

Contrary to the bleak picture painted by critics, a new IDC study of more than 1,000 organisations worldwide shows that AI will be in the workplace "sooner than we think", and will have a positive impact on productivity, revenues, and job creation. From 2017 to 2021, the Salesforce-sponsored study predicts that AI-powered CRM activities will boost business revenue by $1.1 trillion, and create more than 800,000 direct jobs and 2 million indirect jobs globally, surpassing those lost to AI-driven automation. The business revenue boost will be led primarily by increased productivity and lowered expenses due to automation, which account for...

Amazon has been selling Kindles for 10 years now, but “waterproof” hasn’t appear on its list of incremental technological advancements until now. The company just announced a new version of its popular e-reader that builds on last year’s Kindle design and now has an IPX8 waterproof rating. The new Kindle Oasis — the same name as last year’s premium Kindle — has jumped up in size, moving from a 6-inch screen to a 7-inch screen. It has an aluminum back, which gives it a more premium look and feel than the Kindles with soft-touch plastic. Unlike last year’s Kindle Oasis,...

A new partnership between Rolls-Royce and Google will see ships become smarter and self-learning thanks to advanced machine learning algorithms. It will also bring the company’s vision of a fully autonomous ship setting sail by 2020 a step closer to reality. Rolls Royce announced this month that it will use Google’s Cloud Machine Learning Engine across a range of applications, designed to both make today’s ships safer and more efficient, and to launch the ships of tomorrow. Initially the machine learning engine will be used to further train existing AI algorithms designed to power the image recognition systems of vessels....

The Google Calendar web app just received the long-awaited Material Design update. Here's how to get it right now.

Last week I returned from a big journalism conference, and it cemented a hunch I’ve been ruminating on for a little while now: A lot of the chatter in the hallways was about data suggesting that readers have started paying less attention to the quick-churn news cycle. Web traffic to news sites appears to have declined across the board from the spikes after Trump was elected. That’s a problem for a lot of an industry that derives most of its revenue from the ad impressions that load every time you click on a story, whether or not you end up...

Caracas (AFP) - Inside a locked room in an office building in Caracas, 20 humming computers use their data-crunching power to mine bitcoins, an increasingly popular tool in the fight against Venezuela's hyperinflation. In warehouses, offices and homes, miners are using modified computers to perform complex computations, essentially book-keeping for digital transactions worldwide, for which they earn a commission in bitcoins. While practiced worldwide, Bitcoin mining is part of a growing, underground effort in Venezuela to escape the worst effects of a crippling economic and political crisis and runaway inflation that the IMF says could reach 720 percent this year....

Need a house? Just click your mouse three times and say “There’s no place like home.” A building company is now selling actual houses on Amazon that anyone can purchase online–but they are not your average humble abode. The tiny houses, sold by MODS International, are fashioned out of shipping containers and are each 320 square feet, according to Apartment Therapy. Despite their shortcomings, the homes seem rather luxurious inside.....

SEATTLE — Amazon.com has driven an economic boom in Seattle, bestowing more than 40,000 jobs upon a city known for Starbucks coffee and Seahawks fandom. Its growth remade a neglected industrial swath north of downtown into a hub of young workers and fixed the region, along with Microsoft before it, as a premier locale for the Internet economy outside Silicon Valley. Seattle is the fastest-growing big city in the United States, a company town with construction cranes busily erecting new apartments for newly arriving tech workers. Google and Facebook have joined Amazon in putting large offices here. When Amazon made...

Three senators are putting pressure on internet giants like Facebook and Google to be more transparent about who is buying political ads on their sites in the wake of revelations that Russian-linked operatives placed ads on social media networks to sow division in the runup to the 2016 election. On Thursday, Republican Sen. John McCain announced he is joining Democratic Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Mark Warner to co-sponsor the Honest Ads Act, which would require political ads sold on the internet to follow the same rules as ones sold on television, radio, and satellite networks, all of which have to...

Trying to find an unused retail version (on eBay, etc.) of older versions of Creative Suite is next to impossible, unless you've got a lot of $$. I read that, if a person has a Creative Cloud subscription, he can download legacy versions of Creative Suite from http://www.adobe.com/downloads/other-downloads.html I have two questions about things that aren't clear: 1. Does the user have to own a previous license for CS6 (or other legacy version), or does the CC license qualify to use both CC and the legacy version? 2. If a user stops the CC subscription after a year, is he...

YouTube videos of police beatings on United States' streets. A widely circulated internet hoax about Muslim men in Michigan collecting welfare for multiple wives. A local news story about two veterans brutally mugged on a freezing winter night. All of these were recorded, posted or written by Americans. Yet all ended up becoming grist for a network of Facebook pages linked to a shadowy Russian company that has carried out propaganda campaigns for the Kremlin, and which is now believed to be at the centre of a far-reaching Russian program to influence the 2016 presidential election. A New York Times...

Alibaba executive vice chairman Joseph Tsai said Tuesday he expects to boost US jobs by expanding the Chinese firm's e-commerce platform -- not by hiring American workers. Tsai, speaking at a California tech conference, made the comments to follow up on a headline-grabbing pledge earlier this year by Alibaba founder Jack Ma and US President Donald Trump that the Chinese internet firm would create one million US jobs. The pledge by Ma was seen at the time as more of a public relations move than a promise to hire in the US. When asked what Alibaba was doing to deliver...

The answer for digital campaigners moving forward isn’t to abandon experiments, testing, and analytics. The answer is to listen better and to continuously test standing assumptions. The 2016 Trump campaign’s digital director, Brad Parscale, was featured on 60 Minutes last week. Much of the interview focused on the central role of Facebook in Trump’s digital strategy. Parscale shared that he “understood early that Facebook was how Donald Trump was going to win. Twitter is how he talked to the people. Facebook was going to be how he won. …We did [ads] on Twitter, Google search, other platforms. Facebook was the...

A tweet from Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) that mentioned Planned Parenthood’s sales of aborted baby parts led to Twitter blocking a campaign ad in her bid for a US Senate seat in her state. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey labeled Blackburn’s tweet “inflammatory and likely to evoke a strong negative reaction. On the one hand, there’s the woman who already has to deal with the emotionally difficult decision to terminate her pregnancy. Awareness that her baby might be cannibalized and sold for parts like a junked car would add unnecessary trauma to that decision.” “On the other hand, there is potential...

U.S. adults disregard potential negative impact of Amazon's presence Time is running out for cities to submit their bids to become Amazon.com Inc.’s second home. The tech giant announced plans last month to open up a second headquarters — and its hunt for a host city. Bids from metropolitan areas are due Thursday. There are plenty of willing contestants: Mayors across the country have launched viral-worthy campaigns enticing Amazon to choose their cities, with the winner set to be announced sometime in 2018. A Sept. 29-Oct. 1 Morning Consult survey found that 72 percent of a national sample of 2,201...

Julian Assange, the founder of whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, has published a mysterious 68-digit code on Twitter that many believe indicates a fresh disclosure is on the horizon. The string of letters and numbers, which appears to be an encryption key, or hash, sparked a frenzy of speculation across social media, with many claiming that it meant that a new leak about Hillary Clinton was imminent. Others believed it was a so-called "dead man's switch." Hashes of this nature can be used to verify the transfer of documents or files and are often described as a digital signature. Assange has not...

The Hillary Clinton mope tour, which should have reached a high water mark, has gone global. It entails drumming up her credentials (immaculate, we are told, but unnoticed), and pouring upon the man who beat her to the White house (a danger to the world). The latter is the fundamental point: Donald Trump would not have won, not because of Clinton’s flaws but because of what others did. One of those big others remains WikiLeaks. The other, supposedly, is its Russian ally – no, employer, sponsor, even, there one say it peering into that dark mind of hers, director-in-chief. Forget...

Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton became visibly irritated during an interview with Australian TV when she was asked about Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange. In the interview with 4corners, she appeared tired with bags under her eyes, and her bitterness over losing the election to Donald Trump clearly remained. “I think Assange has become a nihilistic opportunist who does the bidding of a dictator,” Clinton said, apparently referring to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. When the interviewer noted many people in Australia view Assange as a “martyr for free speech and freedom of information.” Clinton bristled. “I mean, he’s a tool...